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2013-06-03

FOLLOW-UP: Rebutting the New York Times Review of "A Universe From Nothing"

Somehow a few months ago, my family discovered the existence of this blog, and the first post they read was this one, for which this post is a follow-up. They then bought the aforementioned book for me so that I could read it and perhaps understand the criticisms laid out in the New York Times article that I rebutted.

Well, I read the book. It was a fairly interesting read. Having taken the class 8.033 — Relativity, I would say that everything up to around the middle of the book is stuff I've seen before in the context of general relativity. After that comes some stuff that is new to me, like the ideas behind inflation, virtual particles, and how multiverses can be explained within the framework of quantum field theory. They were all new and fairly strange ideas, but I accepted them fairly easily because it was clear how they fit into the framework of quantum field theory. After finishing the book, I went back to read the book review as well as my rebuttal of it, and I have to say that in many ways, the book review looks even slightly more ridiculous than before, and I'm actually quite happy with the assessment I laid out about a year ago.